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Don't cry. The contributor will be fine. If you get flamed by Linus you've already earned a badge of a high profile developer. And even best of us sometimes do something stupid and a little direct cold shower is not going to hurt anyone. Linus is not bulling people, doesn't target them for no reason, doesn't do sneaky politics to undermine people, etc.
And in this case, where the person has deliberately, repeatedly, tried to use code they don't understand, it makes it clear that they need to either learn enough to be sensible on the topic, or go away and not come back.
This is on the milder end of the spectrum when it comes to Torvalds’ flames. And I’d argue it’s not entirely undeserved.
Really? I mean even if that guy was sneakily trying to implant a bug, I still couldn’t talk to him like that.
I would never, ever contribute upstream to Linux so long as Linus is involved. My time is too valuable to deal with his BS.
He should realize the hostile environment he creates drives away contributors.
I know nothing about what they're talking, but the response appears reasonable and mature, seems to engage in the substantive issues without responding to the anger/flaming, and looks like it intends to de-escalate and move forward. Torvalds' reply to that is more measured https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2401.3/04260.html>.
There's a step back in tone a few replies later, but if you go through the next dozen or two messages over the next couple of days, it seems like things go a totally different path than might be expected from the linked submission.
Anyway, I thought it was worth a perusal. Good example of how to respond to something like that.
News from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172487
This is very uncharacteristic of the direction Linus was heading. Damn, Steven must have seriously fucked up. >You copied that function without understanding why it does what it does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE. AGAIN. I generally believe in positivity but if I saw this as his direct report I'd move him to another project ASAP to get scrutiny on his code quality.
I'm not sure I'd start there, but I'd definitely want to understand what problem the person was trying so solve. Might be legit, might be OKR-driven development.
The amount of support give by other posters here for Linus’ insane antisocial behavior is crazy. I would never, ever contribute upstream to Linux so long as Linus is involved. My time is too valuable to deal with his BS. He should realize the hostile environment he creates drives away contributors.